Caribbean

  They now set themselves a hazardous task, for their only chance of escape lay in reaching Portugal, which was well to the west, and many obstacles impeded that path. They would have to cross first the Guadalquivir River, where the treasure ships entered on their way from Mexico to Sevilla. Then the great empty Marismas plain blocked their way to Huelva, from where Columbus had left to find the New World. At Huelva, there would be another river, and then a short, dangerous run into Portugal. It was dangerous because in these troubled years Spain and Portugal were engaged in what amounted to an undeclared war, so the border was well guarded. But in another sense that would be helpful, for certainly no Portuguese would send them back to Spain.

  They survived through days of terror and nights of starvation, and at Sanlúcar they crossed the Guadalquivir in a stolen rowboat that passed almost under the creaking prow of a caravel coming home from Havana laden with silver and gold, and when light from the ship’s lantern fell across Tatum’s face, Burton whispered: ‘Where’d you get that scar?’ and Will replied: ‘Protestant clergyman burned me in Barbados. Catholic priests going to burn me here in Spain. Who wins in this game?’

  Transit of the Marismas, that vast semidesert fronting on the Golfo de Cádiz, proved more difficult, for during the first half of their journey they had no food; then, after Burton, a most resourceful man, stopped two exit holes from a burrow and dug out a pair of rabbits which the fugitives chewed raw, they spent the second half with no water. Near Huelva they came upon a small stream, of which they drank to near-explosion, and again feeling no compunction, they robbed two houses in succession, murdered the occupants of one, crossed the river north of the town, and made their way into Portugal.

  The deprivations of their trip intensified in each man his consuming hatred of all things Spanish, so that when the Portuguese authorities welcomed them and wanted to place them on a ship running a Spanish blockade, they leaped at the opportunity, and spurred their fellow sailors whenever a chance presented itself to board and capture a Spanish ship. Where fighting ensued, for Spanish sailors had grown accustomed to warding off English, French and Dutch ships trying to steal their treasures, Tatum and Burton were remorseless. They killed when there was no necessity, when the outcome of battle had already been decided, and they did so with glee. For as they warned their fellow sailors: ‘If the Spaniards capture you, they burn you alive.’

  In this fearful lusting for revenge, the two iron-hard sailors spent most of 1665 on Portuguese ships prowling the Spanish coast, intercepting Spanish vessels, and spreading terror. Once when they put into Lisbon they learned that their homeland was again on the way to becoming Catholic and they wondered if it would be safe for them to head back to London.

  One spring morning in 1666 they sailed out of Lisbon on one of the many English ships that slipped in to trade at that port, and during the run north, as they neared the English coast, the sailors informed Will and Burton of the tragedy that had afflicted London during the past year: ‘It’s over now, mostly. But while it lasted, it was terrifying. The Black Plague they called it, and death was so common they couldn’t even bury the victims proper. Threw them in ditches at the edge of town and had horses drag earth over them.’

  ‘What is this plague, as you call it?’ Tatum asked, and one of the men explained: ‘Nothin’ you can see. Nothin’ that causes it. You get up in the mornin’, feel dizzy, feel tight in your lungs, so you lie down and never get back up. End of three days, always three, they cart you off.’

  Another sailor added: ‘When we was last in port, fierce, ragin’ sweep. Thousands died. We fled without a full cargo. Captain shouted one afternoon: “We leave this hell port!” and off we went, untouched.’

  ‘But we’re going back,’ Tatum protested, and the sailors assured him: ‘Safe now. The plague ran its course, a ship told us in Lisbon.’

  It had, but not quite, for when Tatum and Burton went ashore, deeply moved to be in England again, they used some of their pirate gains for lodgings in the mean quarter close to the wharfs, and there the brave Welshman Burton woke one morning with a racking fever. Unable to leave his bed, he told Tatum: ‘It’s the plague. See I have a proper grave,’ and in the foreordained three days, he was dead.

  At some danger to himself, Tatum buried the man who had saved him from burning, and at the lonely graveside, attended only by himself, the clergyman and the gravedigger, Burton, whose first name Will had never known, was laid to rest. The gravedigger, a man whose occupation kept him apart from people, wanted to talk as he started to shovel in the echoing earth: ‘We couldn’t dig enough graves last week; same, two weeks before. This may be the last of the lot. Plague’s over, they keep tellin’ us, but it wasn’t over for him, was it?’

  Tatum spent the next five months trying in vain to find a cargo ship headed for the Caribbean. Fear of the plague had halted traffic into London, so he was still in his foul quarters on the wharf on the second of September when, as the devout claimed, ‘God sent a fiery furnace to cleanse London of sin and the plague.’ It started innocuously, a fire among some old houses so unimportant that on that first day Tatum was not even aware that a conflagration was under way. But on the next day, he and the vagrants living in the mean shacks around his gathered to watch the columns of smoke rising from the center of the city, and that morning soldiers ran through the wharf area, shouting: ‘All men report immediately. Bring axes and shovels.’ At sunset the sky was lighted by flames, and on the fourth of September it seemed as if the entire city was ablaze. Three-fourths of it was.

  Tatum worked without rest for two days and two nights, sometimes rescuing people from houses soon to explode in flames, at other times trying to chop down old structures to form a break in the incessant spread. On the evening of the fourth day of the fire, when the flames had subsided, leaving the once-proud city of London a smoking ruin, Tatum fell asleep at the edge of the roadway, exhausted, but well before dawn he was awakened by a military officer, who said sharply: ‘On your feet! Carry these papers,’ and he spent that day trudging along behind the officer as the latter compiled his dismal census: ‘Every church we’ve seen, completely destroyed. Put it down as seventy churches.’

  The burned-out private residences, the officer calculated, must number in the tens of thousands, for when subalterns ran up to him with their reports, they were identical: ‘All houses in my area gone.’ The only good news Tatum heard that long day was that the fires were out, because on the day before, scores had still been raging unchecked. Toward three in the afternoon a group of women got together some food within the walls of a warehouse that had been built of stone, and Tatum ate like a glutton. The officer, smiling at his voracious appetite, commended him: ‘You’ve earned the right to be a pig.’

  The next week a ship reached the Thames with a cargo of sugar and molasses from the Caribbean, and after helping unload it into the arms of people who wept to see sugar again after the fire, Tatum found passage home on the return trip. Like most ships of that time, this one made its first stop at the lovely island of Barbados, and when Will saw the familiar green fields and the reassuring sight of sugarcane growing, tears came to his eyes. He had left this tender, gracious island on a Dutch ship, in 1659, a disgraced and branded exile in search of adventure, and during his years of wandering had participated in pirate battles between great ships at sea, had watched his companions burn, had tried to console the Welshman Burton as the plague reached out to make him one of its last victims, and had rubbed smoke from his eyes as London burned. He had come home with no money, no prospects of work at any known job, but he did have what many lesser men would never have: a burning compulsion, more unquenchable than life itself—someday he would wreak vengeance on Spaniards.

  In the fall of 1666, when Will came ashore at Bridgetown and realized that within minutes he would be back in familiar haunts, he experienced a pressing desire to see four people: the adorable Betsy Bigsby with her golden braids, Nell and Ned and, perversely, his pompous brother, Isa
ac: I can’t wait to see what that one’s up to.

  Landing at the familiar waterfront with one small bag containing the rewards from five years of adventuring, he almost ran to the Bigsbys’ store, only to find that it was now operated by new owners, and when he asked what had become of Betsy, for he was most eager to see her again in hopes that she might still marry him, he received a curt ending to that dream: ‘Met a soldier, went to England.’

  His luck was a bit better when he crossed the street to his sister’s shop. Nell looked painfully worn, but as always she put up a bold front: ‘Ned and I live upstairs, as always, and he’s a boy a mother can be proud of. Isaac? He’s let his knighthood and his plantations go to his head.’

  ‘He got knighted, eh?’ Will whistled softly. ‘And he’s a great plantation owner now?’

  ‘Yes. And judged by some to be an even bigger man than Oldmixon. I can say this. Between the two, they run the island.’

  Will took to young Ned the moment he met him, for he was a fine-looking lad of fifteen, with curly red hair, freckles, and the kind of frank, open face that instills confidence in other boys who would want him on their side in games and in girls who would speculate: ‘Could he swing me in a dance!’

  He had quit the village school at fourteen, having mastered the alphabet, his numbers, the easier theorems of Euclid and a smattering of Greek and Roman history. His early association with Cavaliers at school and church had made him an ardent Royalist, a fact that might have endeared him to his uncle, Sir Isaac, except that the latter wanted little to do with the shopkeeping Pennyfeathers and rarely saw his nephew. Ned spent most of his time helping his mother at the shop, a duty for which he had no inclination, and some in town wondered what the lad would be when he matured, but his lively ways and rambling mind gave no hint that he ever would.

  Uncle Will saw at once that the boy was much as he had been at that age, and to Nell’s surprise, told him one night at supper: ‘Always remember this scar on my face, Ned. I needn’t have put it there. Don’t pick up scars by accident. Earn them in doing something big!’

  Easily, almost without making a conscious decision, Will settled in with his sister, helped with the store, and did odd jobs about the waterfront, where he kept close watch on various ships coming from England or moving westward through the Caribbean to other islands. He told no one what he was looking for, but when the townspeople learned that he had for some years after his earlier departure been a pirate on ships of various nations, they supposed that he might be tending in that direction again: ‘We won’t be seein’ Will for long. Not a solid man like his brother.’

  Will speculated on when he might run into Sir Isaac, and when Nell suggested that in decency he ought to walk out to the old Saltonstall plantation and make himself known, Will said: ‘He knows I’m back. His move.’ Thus, more than a month passed without his having seen Isaac or his wife, Lady Clarissa, but he did not care.

  If he experienced any disappointment equal to his loss of Betsy Bigsby, it was learning that his Dutch friend, Captain Brongersma, no longer brought the Stadhouder to Barbados. ‘And well he shouldn’t,’ a sailor told him, ‘seein’ he lost her and his life in a battle with Spaniards at Cumaná salt flats.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Killed when the Spaniards boarded. Tried to fight them off, but their blades were longer and sharper.’

  This knowledge so pained Will that on Sunday he accompanied his sister and Ned to the parish church, where he said prayers for Brongersma’s turbulent soul, and when he opened his eyes he saw Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa across the aisle staring at him, and next he saw that the clergyman who would be conducting the service was the sniveling fellow who had branded him. It was not a happy Sunday morning, nor were his thoughts of a highly religious nature; they concerned imaginative things he would like to do to the clergyman, Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa.

  At close of service he led Nell from the church, and they both hoped to avoid their brother and his unpleasant wife, but unfortunately, they all met at the church door, where Sir Isaac said with proper aloofness: ‘Good to see you, Will. Hope things go better this time,’ and as he spoke, Lady Clarissa offered the thinnest smile seen in many months. Then they were gone.

  At supper that night, after Ned had left the table, Will asked the question which had been bothering him: ‘Nell, doesn’t Isaac share any of his wealth with you? To help with you and the boy?’

  ‘Never. He’s ashamed of us, and he must be mortified to have you back.’

  Will, who had given his sister whatever funds he had got hold of for work along the waterfront, was so outraged by his brother’s selfishness that he walked out to Saltonstall Manor, as he still called it in hopes that the sturdy Roundhead would one day return to claim it, entered the now-palatial residence without knocking, and confronted his brother in his office. Isaac, afraid that Will had come to chastise him for the stigmatization, reached for an andiron, but Will laughed: ‘Put it down, Isaac. I’m not here to talk about me. It’s about Nell.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘It’s indecent, you living here like this while she struggles in town to keep the store open and her son clothed.’

  ‘He’s a big boy now. He can soon find work as an overseer on one of the plantations.’ Isaac, who in his prosperity seemed taller than Will remembered, added rather haughtily: ‘As a matter of fact, Will, you could too. We need overseers. Have to send to Scotland to get a good one.’ Then he smiled coldly and added: ‘But of course, I suppose you’d rather go pirating,’ and when he showed Will the door it was clear that no money for the Pennyfeathers would be forthcoming from him.

  Sir Isaac’s reference to the difficulty that plantations were having in finding overseers for their sugar fields alerted Will to the many changes that had overtaken Barbados in recent years. Nell filled him in further: ‘Wealthy men like Thomas Oldmixon and Isaac have gobbled up so many plantations that farmers of modest means can find none to purchase. Many of them have moved west to the open lands of Jamaica.’

  ‘What has that to do with Isaac’s plantation?’

  ‘With the white men who would normally serve as overseers gone, Oldmixon and Isaac and their like have to import them—just like it was done in our father’s time. Indentured servants they still call them, fine lads who work their hearts out for seven years, for board and keep but no wages, with hopes that at the end of their seven years they’ll be able to buy themselves a plot of land and become plantation owners themselves.’

  ‘But you say that Isaac and others have grabbed all the available lands. So what do the young Scotsmen do?’ Will asked, and his sister said: ‘Look up young Mr. McFee, who sailed here to work for your brother. He has the story.’

  When Will found Angus McFee, he heard a doleful tale: ‘I lived in a Highland hamlet west of Inverness and sailed here under a misunderstanding. In Scotland the agent promised: “Sir Isaac Tatum will pay your passage out to Barbados, and in gratitude you’re legally bound to give him seven years of honest help. At the end he hands you the wages he’s been saving for you plus fifty pounds thank-you money. Then you’ll be free to buy your own plantation, and you’re on your way …” ’

  ‘I’ve heard that’s how many come.’

  ‘Yes, but when we get here we find it’s all work, horrible hut and worse food, no pay accumulating, no thank-you payment at the end, and no land to buy if you had the money.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘What can we do? As free men, we go back to work for your brother or men like him for whatever wages they choose to pay.’ He leaned against a fence post, and said bitterly: ‘Any chance I had of bringing my lassie out from Inverness to build a plantation and a family is lost.’

  ‘Haven’t you protested?’ Will asked, and McFee spat: ‘I did. Appealed to the courts, but who are the justices? Oldmixon and your brother, and they invariably side with the other plantation owners. An ordinary overseer has almost no rights, a laborer none whatsoever
.’

  When Will heard these details of life on the new Barbados he told McFee: ‘I’d like to learn more,’ and as he moved about the island he saw many things that perplexed him. The next time he saw McFee, he said: ‘Far more than half the faces I meet are black. Didn’t used to be that way,’ and McFee explained: ‘When one white man like Oldmixon owns land that sixteen white men used to work, he has to have slaves … always more slaves—“Get me slaves at the auction when the Dutch ships bring them in”—so now the island has many blacks. In another ten years, fifty rich white men will own all the land and operate it with fifty young Scotsmen like me, one to each plantation supervising forty thousand slaves.’

  ‘The slaves I’ve known,’ Will said, ‘aren’t stupid. Get enough of them in one place, they’ll begin to fight for their rights.’ Anticipating what that would mean, he told McFee one afternoon: ‘I’d not want to live on a Barbados like that,’ and McFee, looking about before he spoke, said: ‘I’m not so happy living on this one.’

  That exchange of two short sentences set in motion a chain of events which would carry the two conspirators far beyond what they contemplated when the more-or-less careless words were spoken, for McFee began to study carefully the operation of the Tatum estates and Will began hanging around the Bridgetown waterfront, noticing with a practiced mariner’s eye all sorts of developments and particularly which ships were coming from where, and it was as a result of this process that he renewed his knowledge of the Tortuga that Captain Brongersma had spoken about with such enthusiasm. It was a unique island, sailors said, lying close to the northwest shore of the great Spanish island Hispaniola, which Columbus had settled and ruled.

  ‘It’s practically French,’ said one grizzled veteran who knew it well. ‘Not half as large as Barbados. Supposed to belong to Spain, which tried to recapture it from time to time. But the French, they’re pirates, really … call themselves buccaneers. Buccaneer is how we English pronounce it. The French word is boucanier. Four years I served with them in Tortuga. Very excitin’ I can tell you. But as I was sayin’, these wild men, and they’re wilder than anything you see on Barbados … believe me, they live on two things. Huntin’ down small Spanish ships, killin’ the crew and stealin’ the vessel and whatever’s inside. And goin’ over to the forests on Hispaniola and killin’ wild hogs. They bring the meat back, cut it in strips, rub in salt and spices and roast it very slowly over a low fire … maybe four days. Boucan they call it, so that makes ’em boucaniers. They sell the meat for a tidy profit to Dutch and English privateers workin’ those waters against the Spaniards.’